In the early 1960s, the American College of Radiology (ACR) became more aware of the importance of public relations for the specialty. The college’s chancellors began to accept the practicality of starting efforts to attract particular elements of the nation’s community.
Perhaps the most critical issue was the US Congress, which was beginning to consider enactment of a national health care insurance plan for elderly and poor people, which was called Medicare and Medicaid. In 1963, the ACR became aware that the draft bill had been prepared for Congress by the American Hospital Association and that it defined radiology, pathology, and anesthesiology as hospital services rather than medical services. I have told that story many times, about the ACR’s hiring a former Texas congressman, J. T. Rutherford, as its lobbyist and managing to win the language of radiology’s medical independence in the final version of the Medicare law. The college also became aware that it had an equally urgent need to inform its own members to change their relationships to hospitals and to get insurance coverage for referred patients in private offices. Indeed, radiologists and pathologists were able to persuade the American Medical Association to endorse their political efforts and added support to Medicare, adding the Part B payment for all physician services.
Another impact in the same years was an awareness that the specialty of radiology had difficulty attracting enough medical students to opt for radiology residencies. In those years, most medical schools did not expose medical students to patients until their junior years. Even the juniors, seniors, and internists had little significance in understanding the vitality of diagnostic x-rays and the attraction of radiology as their medical specialty choice. So the ACR began a series of educational efforts to highlight the importance of x-ray imaging to diagnosis for most parts of the body.
One of the college’s first efforts was the production of a series of x-ray anatomy movies, which were created by a committee led by Armand Brodeur, then a pediatric radiologist at St Louis University. The movies made an immediate impression on anatomy teachers and other medical school instructors, and students would get a basic understanding of the value of x-ray procedures early in their training. Many academic departments pushed to add medical student rotations in radiology. And most medical schools revamped their curricula so that freshmen students could relate to patients. That led to encouraging more medical students to opt for radiology as their medical specialty or as a significant input to their other chosen specialties.
Also in the early 1960s, the ACR accepted the problem that many residency programs did not cover any of the politics or economics or recruitment of radiologists. Led by the 1963 ACR president, David Carroll of Memphis, Tennessee, a new committee, managed by Newton Hornick of Pittsburgh, began to hold seminars for residents with their schools and with the state chapters of the ACR in the states with the resident programs.
In those early 1960s, the ACR’s public relations efforts, with the help of Eastman Kodak, continued to grow. And in the same years, marketing managers from other major companies that sold x-ray equipment and film approached the ACR with offers to help develop public relations projects. By 1964, DuPont, then another major maker of x-ray films, had agreed to produce a 30-minute movie about the role of radiology and, of course, an implication of the contributions of up-to-date films and other processes. General Electric, Philips, and Picker X-Ray, manufacturers of x-ray equipment, also contributed pamphlets. General Electric for some years sponsored advertisements about radiology in more than a dozen leading American magazines. And other companies then seeking to expand their markets to radiologists also would agree to contribute to the costs of joint public relations ventures with the ACR. It was an ACR decision to work with many of its more enthusiastic vendors. And it was a basic decision that the agreed projects with each company were not directly competitive with similar projects with other companies.